Why is there a credit inquiry from a company I never applied with?
Unknown creditors, banks, or clothing companies are running credit checks and soft inquiries on people who never applied for a loan or shopped with them. This leaves individuals wondering whether to dispute the marks, investigate potential clerical errors, or contact someone else about unauthorized activity on their credit report.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Freezing credit at all three major bureaus
- 2Opting out of pre-screened credit offers using optoutprescreen.com
- 3setting fraud alerts
- 4disputing unknown items
- 5pulling all three full reports to check for odd addresses, names, or accounts
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“But my concern came from an unknown employer being added to my report last week. I am a stay at home mom and haven’t worked for 6 years. I disputed it and it came off. But should I be concerned?”source ↗
“There are a couple soft credit hits from last week as well from creditninja and turbo funding that I never applied for.”source ↗
“I haven’t applied for a loan or credit, nor worked, in 6 years so should I be contacting someone else about this? Or could this be a clerical error.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 6How do I dispute a bunch of incorrect charges at once?
- 2How did my credit card get hacked while traveling?
- 3Why did my credit score drop after getting a new card?
- 2Family opened credit cards in my name when I was a minor
- 2Accidentally sent confidential internal email to the wrong person
- 2Accidentally exposed a vape or prohibited item at work